The Reluctant Storyteller
by Last Fading Smile
Summary: He's no bard. But it's not for lack of trying.


"Tell me," she says, and there's a hint of impatience in her tone, and she nudges his shoulder with her own.

He groans and answers, "But you hate the way I tell it."

"Only when you tell it wrong," she replies, but it is not a whole truth. The truth is she likes simply to listen to him, even when he tells it wrongly, because there is a charming candor in the way he tries always to exasperate her that makes her smile, always.

He stretches out with a sigh, folding his arms behind his head and she rolls over onto her side to look at him, while he stares straight up at the sky. Wisps of gossamer clouds drift lazily by on a sleepy breeze, untouched by the ills of the world below; the war seems miles or years ago, and easily forgotten or ignored if not for the constant stirring in her blood. None of that matters on these nights of doting solitude. What matters is the unspoiled grass beneath their bodies; the murmuring of some nearby stream as it slips and tumbles over rocks toward the sea; and the sweet scent of night jasmine that comes upon them in sensuous, intoxicating bursts out of the surrounding thicket, which opens up into a clearing built just for two. In the moonless dark, the dome of sky inside the clearing is an inky sea that writhes with the diamond gleam of a million points of distant light. It seems tonight colder than usual, or emptier, and perhaps that's why she would rather not pay it any mind. She used to lie awake and try to count every star until exhausted she fell asleep, tried to memorise every twisting inch of glittering sky, tried to make up for all the years of forgetting by making sure she never forgot again. Now it didn't seem important. Now she preferred just to look at him.

"Once upon a time," he begins, and immediately she screws up her face in disapproval, and he must see it out of the corner of his eye, because he smirks; he knows she hates when he starts that way, like some child's bedtime story. "Once upon a time," he says again, labouring each word with his lilting irony, "there was a maiden by the name of—"

"No names," she interrupted. Sometimes it was better to know less. It made life simpler. More malleable.

He knows her reasons, and is just teasing her, evidenced when he soon laughs. "Fine, fine. There was a fair maiden with no name at all, born of a noble family of no name either, with many similarly nameless suitors," he continues, and he grins at that word, 'suitors', and she smiles at the kittenish purr of it as it rolls off his tongue, "but she, being a young lady of very discerning tastes, could not love a one of them. One was too fat, another too bald, one had one foot two times larger than the other..."

"This maiden sounds very shallow," she remarks.

"There's nothing wrong with having good taste," he replies, smirking. "Besides, she had other reasons too. Like one of them also smelled of fish guts; have you ever tried to get the smell of fish out of fabrics? No? Well, let me tell you, dear lady, that maiden would be very unwise to invite such a horror upon herself. So she spurned them all, hurting terribly all of their manly feelings." He sniffles with a sympathy dramatically feigned, and she shakes her head with vexation so similarly feigned.

The evening breeze sighs through the trees, like a kiss or a whisper, and a single leaf, shaken and quivering from that embrace, flitters down to land in his hair, and she reaches up and plucks it out. As she pulls her hand away, he catches her wrist with a sighing kiss of his own, and a warm blush spreads across her cheeks that burns up every errant thought inside of her until all that remains is him. She bites down on her lip, gradually harder until she is reminded to take a breath, and the world begins to turn again after a pendulous moment of perfect repose, and she pulls her arm away.

"One day, she sat at the window singing and knitting and whatever else it is that young maidens who aren't tasked with saving the world might do. Her lovely voice captured the attention of an impossibly charming and handsome young soldier, and he was very witty too—actually his sense of humour was probably his best trait, not counting his hair…and did I mention, _handsome_?" She sighs, and he mimics it, still grinning. He turns his head then, and he looks at her from behind his arm, and the grin slowly fades into a smile as he says, "and their eyes met, and in but a moment, she fell in love with him, and he with her," and the smile fades into an affected frown, and so very serious, he finishes, "because she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen." The world seems to stop again, or fade away into a golden splendour. "Are you _sure_ you want to hear this story again?" he asks quietly, as he always does.

"I asked for it, didn't I?" she replies, as she always does.

He turns again toward the night, but the crease in his brow remains. "The maiden's father was furious that his noble daughter could so fall for a low-born soldier of no worth, and so he whisked her away and locked her in the castle tower. And he sent her love to war, where he died in battle after just one month," he tells her, voice like a wilting flower, sapped of its cheer as his thoughts drift to familiar dark corners, inhabited only by demons. She reaches across and lays her palm against his chest, and even through his tunic she can feel his skin is cool, but it takes but a few moments for the contact to warm through, and he glances at her and smiles as the heat touches his heart and drives the demons back.

"So," he says, huffs it out, really, "the maiden, devastated by the loss of her love, and locked away in that terrible place by her cruel overlord, begs the gods to take her life. And the gods are so moved by the sincerity of her pain that they take her, and the soul of her dear departed love, up into the night sky. She's…that one," he says, and points at some arbitrary point of light in the east. "And her love is…that one," and he points at some other random place in the west. Never the same two stars, though the maiden and the soldier are always the same in his mind. That's what haunts him so.

He falls silent then, and she patiently waits, to see what farce he conjures this evening to conclude his tale. One night the maiden was forced to braid a mighty length of rope that she could toss to her soldier so that he could rappel across the sky to her. Another evening she was tasked with constructing a sky-spanning bridge of hard cheeses. On yet another, the soldier was burdened with the arduous labor of taming an ethereal gryphon to ferry him across the divide, because after all, why should the maiden have to do all the hard work? There were many others she was forgetting. But as the silence drags on, her brows knit together in concern, for he seems uncommonly spoiled for inspiration.

Suddenly he unfolds his arms and he rolls over to face her. She wriggles and repositions too, until barely a gasp divides them. The crisp grass beneath her is cold and damp, but it is a chill that is quickly tempered by the incalescence of two bodies that do not actually touch but are nonetheless hopelessly intertwined. Eyes and smiles lock once more in a struggle for control over senses swimming in affection, and he asks her, in an intimate way much more befitting of their closeness, "Why do you like that story so much, anyway?", and for a moment she cannot remember any story at all and thinks him mad. "It's just so…sad," he adds. This is not in the script.

"It's hopeful," she argues, and he seems utterly unconvinced, left eyebrow shooting up into a dubious arch just as his lips contort into a lopsided grimace.

"Hopeful? They both die, without ever having even had a chance to even truly meet! And then, the gods are so 'moved' by her pain that they raise them up into the sky, and they put him on the entirely opposite side of the world, so that still they cannot be together! That seems a rather cruel twist of the knife to me." She suppresses a smirk as his animated remonstration, so passionate as if the maiden and the soldier were real people in real love, and not merely two luckless players in a fanciful tale told for her amusement. She wonders, then, if it was her folly in denying them names that has led him down this path. She had made it _too_ malleable. The smirk dissolves into a pang of guilt.

"But they will. One day," she insists. "And that's beautiful."

"Riiiiight, sure, when she's cried so many tears of anguish that she can float a little raft across the river of her sadness," he says sourly.

"You have to find the beauty in the sadness," she says. "That's how you stop it from hurting quite so much." She speaks from experience; he knows that. But he shakes his head all the same.

"I'd rather just avoid the sadness entirely. Yes. That's the only thing for it," he says, and his voice that was stinging is now defiant, the shake of his head now a determined nod, and she smiles at the earnest innocence aglow in his golden eyes, and she wishes the world worked the way he wished it did. She has been writhing and cocooned upon the web of bitter doubt for so long, toyed with by a divine spider and with no hope for salvation, that it is hard to imagine what splendid freedom he must enjoy in the light of his artless optimism.

"All right. Then what would be your story?"

If he senses that she is gently teasing him, he pays it no mind. "Well, I suppose it would still have to begin with a beautiful maiden locked in a tower," he answers. There is a tug of regret or melancholy that pulls his gaze away for but a moment, as there always is when he speaks of her past, but when it lands back upon her he smiles one of his rich and uncomplicated smiles, and he lifts his hand to her face and brushes her hair behind her ear. "The middle, well, I'm sort of making that up as I go along."

The damnable blush returns to her cheeks and there is a drumming in her chest that was not there a moment before. "Then how would it end?" she asks gravely.

"Well, that part's easy," he says, and he grins. "It ends, 'And they lived happily ever after.'" With that, perhaps before she has time to groan at his threadbare prosaic, he presses his lips against hers, and all thoughts of sadness and of grief flood away like an ebbing river, and in the moment before the world resumes spinning, she believes him.


End file.
